Context

When you talk to people who have played the original Advanced Dungeons and Dragons game from the 1980s, one of the things that you'll learn is that almost no-one ever bothered using all of the rules. While there are a few different reasons for this, the one that is most applicable in my case is the fact that I didn't learn how to play the game from actually reading the rules. Instead, I was taught how to play by a friend, his older brother and some of his friends  In turn, I taught other people how to play. As a result there were a number of us that all played the game in roughly the same way, and ignored many of the same rules.

But it turns out that there were some rules that were almost universally ignored. One that is held up to this day as an object of poor game design is the rule that allowed for Player Characters (effectively, the players' avatars in the game) to earn Experience Points for collecting treasure. Experience Points were a form of in-game reward that tracked a character's level of "on the job learning" as it were, and, along with the idea of "leveling" is perhaps more than anything else, is the mechanic most associated with role-playing games - tabletop, console, personal computer et cetera. For many players, myself included, the idea that a character who happens to find one hundred gold coins buried beneath a barn has learned something about how to use their skills and abilities was ludicrous. To this day, it's not hard to find players and former players who openly deride the rule, and even other games have made special mention of it as something that they don't do.

Looking back and thinking about it, it's not actually as stupid an idea as it seems on its face. But it only makes sense within a greater framework that isn't explained very well in the AD&D rulebooks. In a nutshell, the rule does make sense - so long as you presume that gold, despite the game's inflated prices, is valuable enough to not leave lying around, and thus that to actually get at any given amount of gold, one has to overcome some level of potentially-lethal threat to do so. In other words, the amount of money that player characters could obtain in a given amount of time was intended to be directly proportional to the absolute difficulty of obtaining it. Without this presumption, you quickly ran into situations where the easiest path to character advancement was to convince the Dungeon Master to leave unguarded hoards of treasure around the countryside. But, taken into account, this understanding could be used to make quick determinations about a number of things.

Of course, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons was simply a game, but the idea that information often makes more sense in a context other than the one in which it was presented is, perhaps, universal. The infamous court case where a woman sued McDonald's after badly scalding herself with hot coffee is often sited as an instance where American litigiousness and unscrupulous lawyers after undeserved paydays combine to wrongly punish people and companies whose only crimes are having deep pockets and stupid customers. But tell someone that internal memos from McDonald's showed that the company was knowingly recommending that coffee be kept at a temperature higher than was considered safe as a money-saving tactic, and they're often surprised. And that simple fact casts the whole affair in a new light.

In a world where information often seems to come from black boxes, a certain level of skepticism that one is being given the whole story is often healthy. The answer to this, of course, is not to simply disbelieve everything one reads or hears, but to have more sources of information. And not to assume that our first impulses (or even lasting ones) about something are necessarily correct.

Are You Sure About This?

While it's to be expected that in a court of law that even the Roman Catholic Church would rely on the laws of the land, rather than Canon law, it looks bad for St. Thomas Moore Hospital and Catholic Health initiatives to argue that they shouldn't be held liable for the deaths of unborn twins because fetuses aren't considered people under Colorado state law. It casts the church yet again as valuing money over the principles that it quite publicly expects others to live by, and if given the chance, would codify into law.

Of course, one has to abide by the laws that are on the books, rather than the ones that one would rather were there. But given the beating that the Church's reputation has been taking for the past 20 years, appearing to ditch principle when it's convenient to do so may have been a mistake.

Uneducated Anger

This morning, NPR ran a Planet Money story positing that LeBron James is "underpaid." The basic argument was that James generates FAR more income than he receives in salary. From the standpoint of pure economics, the story relates, James should be pulling down a cool $40 million dollars a year. But he doesn't and there are a number of reasons for that, some of which, we are told benefit James.

But, this being NPR, cue the pious hand-wringing by the dutifully public-minded about how it's an obscenity that LeBron James pulls down an eight-figure salary to "run up and down a court with a ball" and "play a kids game," while teachers only made 40,000 a year. A few teachers waded into the fray to add their voices to the chorus of pious bitterness about the nations "out of whack" priorities and lack of value for what really matters. A few "free market" types waded in with (rather weak) defenses, giving the peanut gallery another set of handy targets for their sanctimony.

But lets look at things a bit differently. The NBA, regardless of what you think of it as a business, is an elite sporting league. There are a total of 30 teams, and each team may have no more than 15 members on the roster. If there were a grand total of 450 teachers in the United States, I'm pretty sure that they'd be raking it in like nobody's business. Instead, as of 2009, there were some 7.2 million teachers (from Pre-K through college) in the United States. If every player in the NBA made LeBron's salary, the combined total would only be enough to pay teachers a little less than $1,100.00 a year. If the entirety of the NBA player roster made the $40,000,000.00 a year that the article suggested is more in line with the value LeBron James brings to the Miami Heat, we could take all of their salaries and pay every teacher in the nation $2,500.00. On the other hand, if we took the combined salaries of teachers and made that the NBA's player salary pool, each and every active player who wore a team uniform would make more than 1,000,000.000.00 a year. (James' current salary utterly vanishes in the rounding error.)

Being both a bit broader and more accurate about things, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2008 there were about 16,500 professional athletes (basketball players to rodeo riders) in the United States, making an average of $79,460.00. While this does best the roughly $52,800 made by public school teachers, the fact there were roughly 3.5 million primary and secondary school teachers means that were there as many paid athletes in the United States as there were teachers, the collective salary pool of all professional sports wouldn't make for a decent part-time job. As a society, we clearly value teachers much more than we value sports. Allowing ourselves to believe otherwise because we're too busy being "outraged" to understand even the basics of the underlying economics doesn't strike me as the best way to honor education.

One For You...

Sometimes, I'm of the opinion that the single biggest cause of "the Great Recession," as it's often called, is that most people don't really understand how businesses work. Whether it's airline loyalty programs, or just the everyday operation of the workplace, people don't seem to understand what goes on "under the hood" in the world around them. Especially when it comes to businesses.

To put it bluntly: we don't operate in a greater society that is set up to succeed when we do. In other words, in the grand scheme of things, the fact that you are I do better tomorrow than we do today doesn't do anything for everyone else. (Conversely, if we're worse off tomorrow than we are today, society at large doesn't really feel the effects of that, either.) And while there's nothing inherently wrong with this state of affairs, it does mean that there are no direct financial/economic incentives for  us to help one another do well. And this applies to businesses as well. And it leads to a very simple conclusion - things are rarely done by others for our benefit. Instead, people do things for their own benefit. We might be somewhat better off as well, but that's a happy coincidence, rather than the direct intent.

Realizing this may help us better evaluate the costs and benefits of the system that we currently live under. And perhaps decide that perhaps we should change it.

No True Human

Humanity is full of jerks. This should not be a surprise to anyone. Throughout the course of your day today, you will likely encounter one, at least in passing. This jerk may be of any creed, race or color. Because, well, humanity is full of  jerks, and so it stands to reason that any sufficiently large group is going to have at least one jerk in it. To a certain degree, we all understand this.

This, however, doesn't do anything to mitigate the human tendency to want to a) tar others with the behaviors of people that the tarred may not ever have even met or b) strive to portray whatever group one belongs to as absolutely free of jerks, crazies and criminals. Whether it's the assertion that Atheists are suspect because Communist dictators were non-believers or feeling a need to rebut assertions (warning, {unrelated} autoplay video imbedded in page) that recent mass shooters were "mostly registered Democrats," self-serving pattern recognition and the perceived need to combat it are alive and well.

Being primarily social animals, it's important that we care about what other people think of us. Within limits. And that is perhaps what is missing here. The "No True Scotsman" logical fallacy (and the converse, which we could term "Every True Scotsman") is driven by the need to expunge some group of people of a trait that is completely unrelated to the defining aspect of the group's identity. To use the examples from the Wikipedia page on the logical fallacy, what difference does it really make if a Scotsman turns out to be a sex offender or doesn't like haggis? Given that we understand that people are individuals, the willingness to surrender and/or deny that individuality simply in the service of cynical attempts to improve our social ranking, either by elevating ourselves or denigrating others becomes nonsensical, and the time spent attempting to refute such attempts is, quite frankly, wasted, especially in the industrialized West. Yes, there are places (and times) where what Group A, or simply certain powerful members, thinks of Group B is a matter of life and death. The Scotland of the 1970s and the United States of the 2000s are not typically counted among them, although it must be acknowledged that the tendency to confer "out-group" status, and then use that to justify taking actions that would not otherwise be tolerated is sadly, universal. (But it is, perhaps, important to remember the direction of causality at work here.)

While such groups do still exist, the majority of humanity is no longer comprised of small groups of hunter-gatherers for whom the people living just over the next rise were an unknown quality and potentially deadly threat. And so the evolutionary adaptations to that environment aren't always helpful anymore. But as is often the case with hard-wiring, it tends to be less about what's appropriate to the situation than it is about what's right at hand. But while negative stereotyping and the fear of same may be automatic responses, that doesn't mean that we should treat them as useful ones. We've overcome a number of evolutionary traits to get to where we are. Perhaps overcoming this one will help us go farther.